end. We have stirred up many ideas. In putting them in their places in
your head, you will consider them with care. Order is almost the whole
of knowledge.
Come. The morning is about to be born, the real morning, and I do not
wish to disturb that to which men are accustomed. I have never done so.
The duty of the gods is to respect logic.
We took a long walk through the fresh, flowering paths. It seemed to
me that the familiar garden became an immense and magical forest. The
perspectives stretched out under tall trees to a stream that flowed
slowly under the poplars that edged it. Then the stream disappeared;
it was a glade where roebuck passed in troops. We went on and the
appearances changed continually. At certain moments I found again the
garden of my summer mornings, with its lawns, its flower-beds, its
trees, from which doves kept falling, its paths, its seats; I seemed
to hear the laughter of the children, the disputes of the players, the
murmur of the couples. All this went on in my head, accompanied by
my friend's words, and I was drunk, with love, with ideas, and with
loveliness.
HE
We have settled several great questions with the logical intrepidity of
our minds....
I
As for me, I hear and I believe.
HE
An understanding auditor is half of the discourse. The solitary sinks
and loses himself in the whirlwind of his reasonings. A word, even a
look, is enough to give him back his equilibrium.
I was saying, then, that we have done like the philosophers. We
have solved the great questions of metaphysic, by attacking them at
the head, that is to say at the part that is unattackable. To their
affirmation of an absolute and at the same time conscious god, we have
opposed, as we have a right to do, a simple and categorical denial. We
could take up the attack at the other end, begin from ourselves, seek
our cause, find God, seek the cause of God, and so on to infinity.
However large a number one conceives, a larger is always possible. And
so this terrible God recoils as one draws near him into the depths of
the abysses, and the tired intelligence, like a huntsman who yields to
the ruses of his quarry, turns round, goes home and thinks of supper,
that is to say of practical life.
These subtle games give the mind a juggler's skill. They are neither
without attraction nor without utility, but they are games. Drunkenness
is to be found in them, but not happiness. Now, happiness is the
important matter. One must be happy. Let us, then, limit ourselves to
the affirmation that the world is not governed by an intelligence at
once infinite and conscious. For lack of another word, let us stop at
the idea of chance, as in the time of my dear Epicurus. Nothing has
been found more beautiful, more clear, nothing that better satisfies
the mind of a man or the mind of a god. It comes to the same thing
as saying: that which is, is. This simple proposition admits of no
objection; it defies every sophism and every artifice.
The idea of God is only the shadow of man projected in the infinite.
Make use of this sentence as supreme refutation and you will find few
minds capable of disentangling its meaning or even of relishing its
irony.
I do not speak to you of the gods of the nurses, of the little naughty
children, and of the good labourers. People sometimes amuse themselves
in narrating my appearance on earth, and I am to be seen, in these poor
tales, drinking thin wine, gossiping with housekeepers, encouraging
strikes, singing the _internationale_, denouncing silk dresses, furs,
and white gloves. I appear to the astonished populace as a half-tipsy
dolt and a good fellow, and yet at sight of me civilised men fly for
their lives and give place to the mob. The divine ideal of the priests
does not much differ from this, and, after all, if I had to choose, I
should perhaps prefer the company of labourers to that of seminarists.
But I have never been accessible to such humble desires, and, moreover,
I am not God, I am only a god. That is why I laugh at the confusion of
the catechisms, of the pious dreams and of the revolutionary dreams
alike. I have no power, but I have never desired either the reign of
equality or that of sanctity. I would rather breathe your flowers than
your souls, your women than your intellects. Your flowers! Shall I
tell you? We have no flowers; we have only those that grow wild in our
uncultivated fields, our pathless forests! The gods do not work....
My master plucked a magnificent pearly rose, a rose as lovely as a
woman's face, and remained for a long time silent. I understood that he
was meditating. He murmured--
"Work: this rose is a work...."
He compared it in his mind to the frail graces of the eglantine.
HE
All is contradiction. I would say no more. Those who created this
rose are not those who enjoy it. No payment is the equivalent of the
pleasure I feel in breathing its scent; and I, I have done nothing
but pass by, and pluck it. Men rebel. How will you prevent them from
rebellion? They are right....
He stopped, observing, but without seeing it, the delicious landscape
that surrounded us. The emotional silence was only disturbed by the
murmur of the bees, the shrill cries of the little birds, or the light
falling of the doves who dropped from the trees with a noise of silk
dresses.
I was chewing bits of grass, with an air, like his, of preoccupation,
but I was thinking of next to nothing.
HE
They are right. And yet rebellion is useless. It is ugly. Happiness is
not in revolt. You should find a balance. You do not know how to rest.
I did not scorn work just now, but praised idleness. Take these two
ideas and plait them harmoniously together. Your life, short as it is,
would be as good as ours, if you were to succeed in uniting these two
alternatives. The same people should turn by turn rest and work. But,
to make oneself worthy of leisure! Perhaps more intelligence is needed
to know how to do nothing than to know how to work.
The present state of things cannot last. But can one ever tell? And if,
by chance, it should last? Then, there would be formed two castes among
men. They exist already in sketch, they would come to exist in precise
drawings with violent contours. It would be almost impossible for a
slave to become a master. But a master would always be able to become a
slave. Your masters of the day are only slaves who, freed for a moment,
will necessarily fall back into the servitude that is their destiny.
You see, I am amusing myself with prophecy. None the less, what I
know of the order of things is what is apparent to the eyes of all.
Do not take my words too seriously. On the whole, since men have had
laws, these laws have not varied. No doubt, from that moment, your
evolution was complete. Perhaps you will never be able further to
modify yourselves, if not by external means. Hence the need of material
progress, which is only grandiose vanity. At the end of the swiftest
journeys, the man and the woman meet face to face, seeking in each
other's eyes the motive of living, that is to say happiness.
Earth has become a narrow cage for you. However, birds that you are,
it is your cage, and you are forbidden to leave it. You can paint
it in the tenderest colours; it is a cage, and it is your cage. You
will no longer go to heaven, the stars have fallen. If this heaven of
which the childhood of humanity dreamed is a paradise, all the seats
in it are taken. We have no need of you, and are happy where we are;
we shall never give place to you. Besides, at what moment would you
undertake the journey? At your death? When one is dead, it is a little
late for travelling. The immortality of the soul was without doubt
the masterpiece of the ecclesiastical imagination. With this truth in
his pocket, a man may wander through all countries, and always find
servants. The woman who has lost her lover kisses the feet of the
impostor who promises her the renewal in the beyond of her temporal
felicities. The priest offers his slipper with indifference. They
are the happiest of men, for they have ended by believing in a fable
so productive. How should they deny the truth and beauty of this
marvellous tree whose fruits are gold and love together?
Those who promise a terrestrial paradise are no less baleful to human
energy. They too teach sacrifice, the scorn of the present hour, and
walking and working with eyes fixed on the future. Priests of religion,
priests of politics, all sell very dearly the tickets of a lottery
that will never be drawn. Do they know it? Tile merchants of perhaps
are not necessarily merchants of lies. Some of them are the first to
be duped by the secrets they have inherited, and they make victims of
themselves for the vanity of leading a more numerous troop of victims
to the sacrifice.
A tradition encourages you to honour the martyr for his faith. The
martyr is only an obstinate man. He is in the wrong, since he is
conquered. The death that menaces him should have enlightened his
understanding.
The wise man has but one belief: himself; the wise man has but one
fatherland: life.
Do not imagine that I am teaching you the vulgar selfishness of the
comedies and the drinking songs. Oneself may cover a world. The brutes
are the only solitaries. A man's sensibility is a surface whose extent
he alone is capable of measuring. One being often includes many
beings. If it does not include at least two, it is not human, perhaps
not animal; it is one of the stones in the road under the feet of other
men. True selfishness is a harmony.
But this harmony must be composed by oneself, and woven with one's own
hands. To receive happiness ready-made would be offering one's neck
to the rope. Christianity found a very beautiful formula:--to work
out one's salvation. Now that is a personal work. If some one should
propose a method to you, examine it. If you are being offered salvation
already prepared, turn away your head: the food is poisoned.
Also, I bring you no commandment. I submit a system to you: the
living of one's life. What do those movements of the world matter to
you that do not touch your sensibility? Keep your tears for your own
pains, and for those that scratch you like brambles as you pass.
There is no other ethic than this: the conquest of pain. If it wounds
you, be silent, and think of your revenge. Words are snares. Joint
responsibility? Have you felt the prick? No? Then you have no share
in the responsibility. Do not judge by the intellect the affairs of
sensibility, and, when your business is to understand, be insensible to
all that is not reason.
I
But how conquer pain?
HE
Physical pain is the business of your doctors.... The remedy for moral
pain is confidence in oneself. To yield to pain is to accept the worst
of humiliations. To suffer because of a woman is to make oneself the
slave of a woman. But there are moments when it must be pleasant not to
deny one's pain. One makes a pleasure of it.
1
I have known such moments.
HE
There are unconquerable evils. Then the idea that life has an end will
help to support the weight of it. Finally, my friend, there is the
supreme act that your resigned morality blames, the act the vision of
which gave so much energy to the careless life of the ancients: there
is suicide.
Suicide is a monster that one would have to train oneself to observe
with calm. Compared to certain physical evils, to certain pains, to
certain forfeitures, it would soon appear as a friend, very ugly,
but cordial. Does it not deserve the gentlest names? Is it not the
consoler? Is it not deliverance?
But one must not play with suicide. Amorous children have made of it
a gesture as puerile as their souls. This supreme refuge from great
pains should not be the remedy for little deceptions. If your morality
had chosen, instead of the teasing rôle of a jealous old maid, that
of an amiable and prudent friend, it would have taught you the art of
wrestling with Destiny, and, when her grip is invincible and cruel, the
supreme feint, which is to vanish in smoke. To have made a cowardice of
suicide is a singular idea. It is explicable in the order of religious
beliefs; it is mad for the man who believes neither in the survival of
the soul nor, above all, in future compensations.
Since, whether you will or no, my friend, death is your destiny, at
least live. Do not always look at your feet, but do not look too far
before you. To be born, to appear, to disappear: forget the last term.
Human wisdom is to live as if one were never to die, and to gather the
present minute as if it were to be eternal.
I
If the present minute could but last for ever!
HE
Why not? How long have you spent with me? Do you know? Two hours or an
eternity?
I
It seems to me that I have always known you, always seen you, always
heard you.
HE
Very well! That is how to live.
I
Do you, who deny blessed eternity to men, give it them by your presence
and your words? Who are you then?
HE
Have I not told you? See, he doubts already.
I
It is that I am too happy.
HE
Poor men, divine sensations are too strong for the fragility of
your nerves. What would you do with an eternity? You would spend it
in trembling lest you should lose it. Happiness, for you, is not
possession but desire. When you no longer have anything to desire,
boredom comes, sits down on your knees, and slowly crushes you. You
find the woman who has made you drunk heavier than a mountain when the
drunkenness passes away, and you groan if the head that is still wet
with your kisses leans too lovingly on your arm or on your shoulder.
You find happiness only in closing your eyes; on opening them again
you find boredom. Since you do not know how to live, dream, believe.
You would be glad, would you not, if you were able to doubt my words?
Well! I give you leave. Do like so many other men. Accept the practice
of a belief that makes you laugh, and of an ethic that you scorn ...
I
No, no, I am free! You have loosed my hands, you have taught me to
breathe.
HE
Ah! So the method I propose to you is not so bad! I believe, indeed,
that, of all those that can rule the life of a wise man, it is the most
voluptuous. If doubt has no longer a place in your intelligence, put it
into your actions. Knowing the vanity of everything, of religions, of
philosophies and of ethics, submit outwardly to customs, to prejudices,
and to tradition. Time your step to the rhythm of the popular mind.
I
What! Submission?
HE
Do you prefer revolt?
I
I am not a slave.
HE
Very true. But liberty is an internal joy. One is the more free the
less one seeks to appear so. A woman is less beautiful when she has
divulged her beauty. A man is less free when he makes a parade of his
liberty. One must hide one's good fortunes.
My friend, I have shown you the philosophy of the gods. Accept its
method if you feel yourself strong enough to follow it without despair.
We are, and that suffices us. Can you say as much? you who cannot take
a step towards happiness without taking one towards death? Hope, if
you have need of hope. Drink, if you are thirsty. Do you think that I
am jeering, and that, after having treated you as a god, I am treating
you first as a man and then as a child? No. The truth is that every
question immediately receives in my mind all the different and even
contradictory solutions that can answer it. I see, would you believe
it, the six sides of the cube at one glance. I know that the least
reasonable of things is reason; I know that nothing is more cruel than
sentiment. There is not one of your systems of which I cannot make a
circuit in two or three thoughts. They are curious ruins; some of them
still attract such a concourse of people that one forgets that they are
ruins. Travel, and make pilgrimages. I have favoured the materialism of
Epicurus, Saint Paul's Christianity, Spinoza's pantheism. Have I spoken
to you of Spinoza? I loved him much also. We used to drink milk while
we were discovering the identity of reality and perfection. He was one
of the two completely happy men I have known; the other was Epicurus.
Spinoza found happiness in asceticism; Epicurus, in pleasure. They both
lived smiling. I regretted them equally. There are two masters for
mankind, and nearer to mankind than myself.
I remember one of Spinoza's propositions: "Each man necessarily desires
or repulses, according to the laws of his nature, what he considers
good or bad." That means: every one naturally desires to be happy.
Great commonplace, and great truth: there is no other philosophy, there
is no other method. Virtue is, to be happy.
They are, then, very wicked, those among you, who, keeping power, that
is to say force, in their own hands, use it to forbid men access to the
road that displeases themselves. What! I should have used my power to
undeceive Cecilia, whose innocent kisses were prayers, whose life was
a happy walk towards martyrdom and heaven! What infatuation, to believe
oneself in possession of the truth, and, then, what childishness, to
believe that the truth is necessarily useful! My friend, what is true
is true, and what is beautiful is beautiful, and between these terms,
and between all that could be inserted, there is no necessary relation.
I smile at human illusions, but I would not make them one in a single
and compulsory illusion.
You love Elise; obey your desires even if they seem absurd to you. She
will do the same for you, and you will both taste great joys.
We had returned, little by little, to our starting point. The young
women joined us near the rose-garden. A different light had replaced
the springtime brilliance that surrounded us. The real morning had just
been born, a clear, cold winter morning. I wished to pluck a rose,
but they disappeared as I stretched out my hand. Elise took my arm and
pressed close to me.
ELISE
I am cold.
I doubted her divinity, I doubted myself, and the enchanted, luminous
night I had just lived. My master's last words were disturbing the
certainty that he had at first established in my mind. I, who had
believed myself a god, became again a man.
HE
That is the effect of doubt. Then you no longer believe in me?
I
I believe in you.
Instantly, things recovered their magical appearance, and I was
happy again. I gently pressed Elise's arm, and she looked at me with
tenderness.
Meanwhile, the two young friends, who were walking before us, had
come upon the steps of the Museum. We followed them. They examined in
silence the cold nudity of all those women of stone, but sometimes I
heard them laugh.
ELISE
And so these are your women.
I
They are not our women. These figures represent our ideal of the
goddesses.
ELISE
Truly, this one is like me.
I
There are women as beautiful as that among us, but one does not know
them. Each one of us thinks he has held in his arms the most beautiful
woman in the world; when he reflects, he is no longer very sure of
it, for, in the depths of his desire, an image ceaselessly forms, and
ceaselessly vanishes, whose beauty no created thing could equal.
ELISE
So reality always deceives you. How do you manage to be happy?
I
We have desire.
I had spoken like a man, and not like one whose mistress is an
immortal. Elise seemed indifferent to the obscure sorrow that darkened
my words.
My nature now was double. When I thought of my master, of Elise, of the
hours passed in the garden, I felt that I was caressed and upheld by
warm waves of joy; when I considered the things of earth, I was cold,
and I was sorrowful.
Elise left me once more to go and join her companions. My master called
me. He was seated at the entrance to the hall, and was looking at
nothing.
HE
I have still a few words to say to you, and these are the most
important. You must forget our conversation.
I
Master, it is impossible. It is part of myself, it has entered into my
flesh, into my blood, into my bones.
HE
Ah, well, you shall know then that I could have told you the exact
opposite, and that that also would have been the truth. Another god may
descend and speak to you and give you other teaching. In which will
you put your trust?
I
Master, you disturb me. Can such a miracle be repeated?
HE
When one believes in a miracle, it may become a daily occurrence. You
see, you would do better to forget.
I
I shall not forget.
HE
And what if I were to prove to you that I do not exist, that I am only
a part of yourself, that responds to another part of yourself?
I
Master, I believe in you, and not in myself.
HE
Behold man with a true Christian nature, man after the fall! You will
never wash away sin, or, rather, you will never wash away penitence.
Why do you not hold your own against me? What a domestic animal has man
become! Have you not at the bottom of your heart a secret desire? Does
the god that I appear to you satisfy fully your need of worship and
humiliation? Speak, my friend, I am what you desire that I should be.
Choose. The phantasmagorias are at your command.
I
Well, yes, I should have wished you to be He, to perfect in my eyes
the legends of my childhood.... But you have spoken, and I no longer
believe but in you, in you alone.
HE
Choose. There is yet time. Choose.
I
I have chosen.
At that very instant, all pleasure vanished, and I felt ill, with that
overwhelming illness that follows nights of debauch. Nothing, however,
had changed around me, and I was standing among the same marbles,
though they were frozen and made me almost ashamed and almost afraid.
I heard the laughter of the young women in the neighbouring hall, but
it seemed to me to come from a bevy of hoydens. My master, still seated
there, was looking at me, but with eyes in which I thought I saw I
know not what cruel mockery, I know not what mournful reproaches. I
was seized with anguish, I breathed with difficulty, I was cold, the
memory of my nocturnal lusts disgusted my heart. I was about to faint,
perhaps, when my master spoke.
HE
So you have chosen. It is well. Good-bye.
I
Oh! No! Not yet!
HE
Would you care to salute those charming young women? Here they are.
I saw them advancing towards me, naked, and smiling from head to foot,
with a docile smile. They held each other by their necks, their arms
entwined, like the three graces, but their hips swayed to an evil
rhythm.
I
How ugly they are! Sorceresses!
HE
They are your sins.
I
I detest them.
They turned and fled. Their buttocks, joined like three curious faces,
made an obscene and singular diagram.
HE
Women belong to metaphysics.
I was too disturbed to understand this saying. I was thinking of Elise,
whom I had loved so passionately, and I wept at seeing her thus. I wept
also over myself and my lust.
HE
Women are creations of sensibility, of intelligence, or of faith;
that depends on the moment, it depends on the man. The difference
between the goddess and the girl of the public harem is made by the
idea of sin. As a sinner, you see courtesans where, as a god, I see
divinities. The world is what you make it, creator without knowing it.
Since you have chosen, good-bye, good-bye!
I
Elise.
She whom I had loved, she whom I loved still, ran towards me, in the
form of the young woman who had so moved my heart. She offered me her
hands and her lips, as if she had returned from a journey, and she
pressed me passionately in her arms.
HE
Then you have not chosen?
I
I cannot separate from her I love.
ELISE
I remain among men.
I
For ever?
ELISE
I remain.
HE
I will come back for you. Good-bye then, my friend, and this time
really good-bye. You sought truth and you have found love. Good-bye.
Elise drew me along. By the door, I turned. My master had disappeared.
This separation, which I was expecting, caused me but a brief sorrow. I
was holding Elise by the hand, I was holding a certainty.
We were now going silently along the deserted street. The joy that
filled my heart lit up the sky, the trees, the houses and everything
else.
Soon, like any other couple after a morning walk, we went home. Elise
had not at any moment the air of a stranger.
Our day was short, that of two lovers mindful of living. My friend
complied with all our customs. But for the memory of the night of magic
that had placed her in my arms, I should not have distinguished her
divine grace from that of a Parisian.
We made with profound joy the discovery of our souls and of our bodies.
It seemed to us that we had known each other always, and always
belonged to each other; it seemed also, at every kiss, that we touched
each other for the first time: these feelings, no more contradictory
than delightful, increased our intoxication, our heads turned, we could
no longer find words for our ideas, and we said a great many childish
things.